I used to use a set of about ten slides with grade seven and eight history classes showing different British castles. I began by asking the students to tell me exactly what they saw; their answers were straightforward, although I sometimes had to fish for details they had either overlooked or taken for granted. What they saw included high towers, battlements, thick walls, castles built on high ground or cliffs, castles overshadowing villages and towns, and so on. My next questions dealt with how, if they had been soldiers at the time, they would have attacked these castles. My questions were always anchored in the slides so that the students were always faced with a specific driveway gates problem—not how would you attack castles in general, but how would you attack this particular building in this particular place? Usually they came up with all the actual techniques of medieval warfare and sometimes added a few of their own devising. Their suggestions had to be realistic: spaceships and death rays were ruled out, as were guns and other modern weapons. Their answers included ladders to scale the walls, catapults to batter the fortifications from afar, mass attacks to saturate the defense, tunneling to collapse the walls, siege to starve out the defenders, and sometimes even bribery.
I pursued each of these suggestions in detail. If the favored method of attack was tunneling, my questions included: Where would you begin the tunnel? Where would you find the labor? How would you make sure it went where it was supposed to go? How would you dispose of the earth? How would you prevent the tunnel from collapsing on the men digging it? How would you plan the tunnel so that it actually would collapse the castle wall? Students always came up with reasonable answers to these questions, but one final question usually gave them pause for thought. How would you cause the tunnel to collapse in the right way at the right time so as to undermine the walls above it and not trap any of the tunnellers. Usually their answers involved a complicated system of ropes tied to the timber props that supported the tunnel, all of which would be pulled away at the same time. It was not difficult to show them that this was extremely difficult to do and too complicated to be successful. Further questioning usually brought them to the solution used by medieval miners: coat the props in some flammable material, set fire to the whole thing (people would have enough time to do this and still get out of the tunnel before it collapsed) and then wait for results.
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